Luan Schooler

Director of New Play Development & Dramaturgy. Luan joins Artists Rep with extensive background as dramaturg, literary manager, writer, and actor, along with administrative experience in marketing and development. Luan honed her skills as a company member of Perseverance Theatre in Alaska, working with then-artistic director Molly Smith on new plays and devised works with wide ranging artists including Paula Vogel, John Murrell, John Luther Adams and Darrah Cloud. She also conducted annual company audition tours to towns and remote villages throughout Alaska (where she enjoyed one of the most thrilling theatre experiences ever, a production of The Unsinkable Molly Brown by the community theatre in Nome). After leaving Alaska, Schooler became the Literary Manager/Dramaturg for Berkeley Rep. During seven years there, she worked with many luminary writers, including David Edgar, Naomi Iizuka, Salman Rushdie, Dominique Serrand, Rinde Eckert, Lillian Groag, Bridget Carpenter, Adam Rapp, and Robert Fagles, and astute directors Tony Taccone, Mark Wing-Davey, Stephen Wadsworth, and Lisa Peterson, among others. She has also worked on several devised pieces at Denver Center with artistic team Pavel Dobrusky and Per-Olav Sørensen, and worked as dramaturg at Oregon Shakespeare Festival, California Shakespeare Festival, A Traveling Jewish Theatre, And Shaking the Tree Theatre. Schooler took a several year hiatus from theatre to explore the dramaturgy of artisanal cheese, opening a small cheese shop, Foster & Dobbs, in Portland with her husband. Delicious though that experience was, the hunger for stories of greater complexity and variety prevailed and she returned to Alaska in 2011 to adapt her brother's memoir The Blue Bear with Leon Ingulsrud (co-founder and co-artistic director, SITI Company) for Perseverance Theatre. She is currently working with Ingulsrud and filmmaker Andrew McLean on a new project for Perseverance about polar explorer Roald Amundsen.